Thread by @AlexandraErin

I have been gathering thoughts to talk about the algorithm/shadowbanning fears, but... this is the basics.

They shadowban very little.

And separate from the algorithm, people miss things. More than you would guess.

https://twitter.com/chelseayrbff/status/1158832010976272386

The right has been decrying "shadowbans" any time one of their valid, unlocked tweets gets "the tweet cannot be displayed", which is more often a server problem. Twitter's servers are a cloud of servers, and our position within them optimized based on who we tend to interact with

Part of how they killed the Fail Whale and improved the general impression of server uptime is allowing the servers to fail quietly and gracefully in small ways rather than catastrophically.

Falling with style.

The preference of social media that we all accept whatever posts they want to show us instead of insisting on chronological view isn't *just* about marketing and control, it also makes us more accepting of the premise they won't show us everything, which they can't live up to.

But even without algorithmic manipulation or network gaps... you won't see everything. Our brain have their own algorithms. The rhythms of our lives create others.

My mother died in June.

It was a big deal.

Several dozen people who've followed me for years and were definitely on Twitter in June are just hearing it for the first time on this tweet.

More than that still don't know.

Not their fault. Not an algorithm. It's how this works.

Disney has some of the best marketing on the planet, in terms of data and expertise and reach.

There were people who walked into the theater to watch Rogue One and were confused about when it took place, where Rey was, and if it meant they had given up on that whole storyline.

Marketers have spent decades studying in depth the paradoxical need to put their message everywhere and repeat it to make sure it's seen and sinks in, while not being so ubiquitous it becomes annoying or just fades into the background.

It's hard!

The good news is that it's easier for your self promo tweets to become background noise than it is for them to become annoying, at least through repetition.

When Twitter says they're giving more weight to replies in the algorithm, that just means that one reply counts as more engagement than one RT or one Like in terms of ranking tweets for the "Home" timeline and other ranked things.

It doesn't mean that the act of RTing something means it will show up less. Your RT adds to its visibility! The net change in its ranking is just less than a reply.

This effects how often the tweet shows up to the OP's followers, more so than whether your followers see your RT.

Similarly, if I RT my own tweet, that doesn't get "shadowbanned". It just doesn't count as engagement (or maybe doesn't count for as much engagement) for purposes of ranking tweets for purpose of pulling tweets to put at the top of Home.

Twitter is also making UI/UX changes that give replies more weight, like showing more of the conversation in people's timelines when you reply to someone else, but showing less of it when someone threads on their own.

Now, this obviously hurts my model.

Although I have to say, it's far from consistent about how it does this. I haven't yet figured out the "rules", if there are any, for when it shows the tweet you're replying to and when it shows the threaded tweets individually and in isolation.

But, anyway, all of this is as much part of Twitter Jack's attempt to increase the amount of "conversation" on Twitter as anything else.

You want to know the best way to boost an artist's work? Click on the link, like, RT, *and* reply. Maximum engagement. Maximum score for rank.

My big concern here -- and I'm already seeing this in art communities -- is that the idea that RTing things makes them less visible will lead to people being afraid to RT, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where Twitter becomes unusable for promoting art.

The bottom line is that Twitter's servers are optimized to try to get the tweets you're most likely to interact with the fastest and most often. And their predictors for this are your past behavior and the behavior of others.

In short: popular tweets are valuable tweets.

And RTing a tweet makes it more popular. Even as RTs mean less to the popularity algorithm, a widely RTed tweet will collect more likes and replies.

Seen tweets get seen.

It takes visibility to get visibility.

If you want to know if you're shadowbanned, type

from:yourhandle

into the search window.

If your tweets come up, you're not shadowbanned. If no results are found, you're shadowbanned.

It mainly hits sex workers.

So, to sum up:

1. Most people aren't shadowbanned.
2. People miss stuff.
3. Twitter's algorithms are partly just there because they know they'll fail if they try to show everyone everything.
4. Please keep retweeting your friends and favorite artists.